I’m always very curious what the Cannes Film Festival thinks is a great film. There have been some truly great movies that have won the top prize (The Conversation, Missing, Secrets and Lies,) and some truly horrible ones as well (Barton Fink, Pulp Fiction, Dancer in the Dark, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.) I’m happy to report that this year they picked a winner. Blue is the Warmest Color is a lovely and mesmerizing film which has been haunting me ever since I saw it. This film does not feel 3 hours long; I’ve seen many 90 minute films that felt much longer than this film. And every minute is quietly gripping.

The French title of this movie is The Life of Adèle, and Adèle is a wonderful character, a lovely-but-average, sexually confused high school teenager who by a series of coincidences falls for Emma, an older, blue-haired college senior in art school. Adèle (though adorable) is complicated, naive, bourgeois, and sometimes frustrating and unlikable, but you cannot help but simply love Emma; she is so cool, so intelligent, so unselfconscious, and bestowed with an unusual kind of beauty. You fall for her right along with Adèle, and are swept up, as she is, by Emma’s passion, her intellectuality, her super-cool, bon vivant family, her amazing friends, and her artistic nature and frame of mind. Their developing relationship is beautiful to watch, in large part because the dialog is interesting and well-written; because it’s a French film, the characters actually have intelligent and interesting shit to say to each other, unlike American films where they just stammer like morons.

A very sizable part of this movie is devoted to capturing the apex of Lesbian sexual passion on film. I should point out that this is not the lame-ass titillation which constitutes American movie sex. This is balls-to-the-wall fucking, filmed straight-up: faces buried in asses, mouths on labias, fierce tit-sucking, crotch-on-crotch grinding, screaming, ass slapping …. It’s liable to be quite a shock, even frightening to most Americans, and if you belong to the 50% of our country that thinks the Earth was created a few thousand years ago, you will definitely be going straight to Hell if you watch this stuff.

The sex scenes are incredibly beautiful and incredibly real, and they are not at all gratuitous; they integrate into the story in powerful ways. Blue is the Warmest Color address an archetypal experience of late adolescence: the tendency to develop an erotic desire toward an admired adult, just at that particularly vulnerable moment in life when an adolescent is trying to figure out who they are and what it actually means to be an adult. The film is a kind of literal artistic representation of this set of thoughts and emotions, and in this way reminded me of the great Italian film Malèna, which did a similar thing with male early adolescence. As the two women’s relationship starts to come apart, Adèle’s loss connects to the sense of loss everyone feels once adolescence is over: that weird, existential heartbreak that stays with you the rest of your life. And in a different way, Emma’s corresponding loss also connects to this idea: the muted sadness when as an adult you look back on the emotions and worldview of adolescence, and realize (somewhat ruefully) that it’s never coming back. This all creates a very powerful emotional current in the movie.

The film also addresses, rather philosophically, the difference between male sexuality and female sexuality; indeed, this topic is explored in the dialog, linking the historical portrayal of women in art with an attempt to grapple with the innately stunted and limited nature of the male sexual experience, compared to the deeper and more profound female sexual experience. To many Americans, this probably sounds like a bunch of “dykey bullshit”, but it comes across very differently in the film. There’s a profundity to these ideas, and their juxtaposition with the flabbergasting sex scenes, that is difficult to capture in a review; it just has to be experienced.

But the film is also about the nature of sexual attraction in relationships, in particular, its limitations. Adèle can’t really assimilate to Emma’s more mature, more sophisticated world, and as they are inevitably pulled apart by these forces, the power of their sexual desire for each other hangs like a specter over everything. Neither one can quite say why their mutual desire is not enough, all on its own. It just isn’t.

When you watch this movie, you really, really don’t want Adèle to lose Emma; this palpable emotional investment that the film creates in the viewer is more evidence of its brilliance. When she finally does, its incredibly sad, but what’s even more striking is the aftermath for both of them, the haunting acceptance of an imperfect reality (and the small piece of the mind that can never accept.) It assaults the viewer on all three levels: the archetypal experiences of adolescence, the inherent limitations of sexual attraction, and for Adèle, one suspects, the trade-offs and limitations of male sexuality. It’s seriously impressive stuff, this movie!

I should say that there were certain faddish aspects of this film which I didn’t care for, like its over-fondness for extreme facial closeups, and its often coldly stark, Lars von Trier-like feel. But somehow these attributes did not derail the film; indeed, the closeups eventually won me over, becoming incredibly moving as the emotional level of the movie rises toward the end. The starkness is not always emotionally cold; it’s sometimes pleasingly Eric Rohmer-like. And as always, when a film features a lot of good, solid dialog, these kinds of smaller issues tend to dissipate in the mind. I wish more filmmakers realized this.

Blue is the Warmest Color is a wonderful and emotionally provocative film. Don’t miss it!